My Shout

Firstly I would like to wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year.

A New Year that will bring with it the greatest sales building opportunity for some time - the FIFA World Cup. It's sure to be a festival of summer football with matches in the early evening to suit the supporting public. So, are we ready for it?

Have you planned to promote it in your pub? Are your banners and posters ordered ready to display in April for the first match on 9 June? Have you organised a World Cup launch party? Are the football viewing times displayed in your pub? Have you planned promotions in line with this great sporting event? What food are you offering during this time? Have you thought about how to get people in on non-England match days? If you're a food pub are you offering football-free deals and female dining evenings?

All this needs to be thought about to ensure that licensees maximise the opportunity and get the punters in the pub rather than sat around the television at home.

It's not rocket science, but you'd think it was when looking at some pubs, which fail to take advantage of any key event in the calendar, leave everything to the last minute and lose customers to the much better organised competition or the easy option - home.

I know running a pub is 24/7 - cleaning, stocking the bar and kitchen, gardening, accounting, employing and not to mention serving the customers - but marketing the pub is as important as all of these and it often doesn't appear on the radar.

The only way you can keep customers in your pub is keeping them interested and, to do this, licensees need to come up with a great marketing and promotional plan. Recently, a Greene King pub did this with profound success.

The Trafalgar weekend in October hadn't created a massive amount of interest, but the Lord Nelson pub in Burnham Thorpe planned to ensure it reaped the benefits by organising a Trafalgar week of activities.

The event turned into their best-ever week at the pub with takings up four times on last year. More than half the new people who visited the pub that weekend have since revisited and this has led to increased sales during November, and I'm sure, more into the future.

Organising activities around key events takes some doing, but the results can have a much greater impact on the business than just the event itself.

And so I hold down this gauntlet to you all, even if the World Cup is not appropriate for your pub, create an event which will attract people to it. Let's make 2006 the year of the pub and put this great British institution back on the map!